Broken Dreams
by NikoArtagnan
Summary: Institutionalized for his beliefs, abandoned by everyone he cared about, and traumatized beyond recognition, Jamie Bennett slowly loses his mind. / 10yrs post-ROTG


**Broken Dreams**

_Institutionalized for his beliefs, abandoned by everyone he cared about, and traumatized beyond recognition by the doctors and workers, Jamie Bennett slowly loses his mind. / 10yrs post-ROTG_

**Warnings:** Foul language, graphic violence, semi-graphic mentions of rape, drug abuse, child abuse, emotional/physical/mental abuse in _spades_, angst, DARK, insanity, mentions of slash, OOC-ness, this has not been beta-read, graphic mentions of death and torture. THIS STORY IS NOT FOR THE FAINT HEARTED I WARN YOU NOW.

I love Jamie. But I wanted to see if I was capable of putting him through hell.

I do believe I have succeeded.

* * *

Jamie knows _he_ exists.

They all do.

Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, the Man in the Moon, and Jack Frost are real. They have to exist, because Jamie remembers them all with agonizing clarity and he's not wrong about them. He can't be wrong.

He's not crazy.

Though the world is screaming _FREAKCRAZYPSYCHO_ at him whenever he closes his eyes and Dr. Hunt give him pills every night that makes the sky turn green and sparkle with dolphins and he's starting to see his dreams in reality and he no longer dreams when he sleeps, _he's not crazy_.

"Right, Jack?" he slurs at the ceiling, seeing the white-haired boy that's haunted his dreams since he was nine years old sitting in the air above his bed, struggling to raise a hand to touch that pale cheek. "'M not crazy, right?"

Jack grins at him. "Of course you are Jamie!" Jamie laughs and struggles even harder to touch that cheek as Jack leans down and pecks him on the lips. Jamie wants to hold Jack, kiss him properly, but damn it all he can't move.

"Asshole," he chokes out and suddenly Jack is gone and Jamie's alone again, rolling over and over in his jacket of pristine white, laughing humorlessly and cursing Jack for leaving him there alone once again.

There are no windows in the bare, white-walled room.

* * *

_He is very quiet as the van pulls through the gates, driving slowly, almost meandering up to the impressive building in the distance. The drugs keep him calm, muffling the panic and shock and terror._

_He is fifteen years old._

_He moves his wrists up and down, hearing the clank-clank of the handcuff chain rubbing against the pole he's attached to at a distance. His body feels like a sack of rotting flesh._

_He feels dead inside._

* * *

Tuesday is Arts and Crafts day. Tuesday is before Wednesday, and Wednesday is the day when Jamie gets to go out and play in the snow. He's pretty excited about that, because snow means Jack and that's always a good thing!

But first, Arts and Crafts.

Jamie is very good at drawing. Everyone says so, from the doctors, to the other patients, who "ooo" and "aaa" at his portraits of them and of landscapes and other things. His main doctor, Dr. Allen Hunt wraps an arm around Jamie's shoulders and whispers a very soft "Well done little Jamie" in his ear.

Jamie has a few pictures of Jack and the others in his sketch books but he keeps those private. The doctors don't like that he draws them. So they're private.

He will show Jack his pictures tomorrow. Jack loves the ones of himself. He's very vain, but Jamie wouldn't have him any other way. Besides, if you looked like him, wouldn't you be vain too?

And so Jamie smiles and draws and gives portraits to people who pay him in candy and sweets and thinks longingly of snow and of sledding like a madman through the streets of Burgess with very faint laughter tickling his ears.

* * *

_His mother is crying as the men lead him out to the van._

_The doctor pats her on the shoulder. "Don't worry, we'll take care of him."_

_Jamie wants to scream invectives into the air but his world is slipping away in a haze of multi-colored lights._

_Jack. He thinks instead. Help me Jack._

_No one comes to his rescue._

* * *

Jamie is in a thoroughly murderous mood today.

The doctors have refused to let him go outside and Jack isn't coming inside. He can see Jack's mischievous blue eyes twinkling at him as the doctor forces him to sit and play board games with the rest of the patients.

He doesn't want games he wants Jack.

Poor Katie Applewright. She adores Jamie and normally he adores her (in his own way) and doesn't deserve to get smacked in the face with a board game just for asking him – _whining incessantly_ - to play with her.

Katie is okay – if a little bruised and bawling her eyes out – but Jamie gets a solid week of solitary for that incident.

The doctors had to drag him, kicking and screaming, to the medicine room, where Dr. Hunt gives him that slightly pleased, slightly sad, and slightly mad smile and he screams even louder.

He should have learned by now that no one listens to the screams. Not here.

Jamie doesn't say anything for five weeks after he gets out of solitary. The circles under his eyes are as dark as a raccoon's and he shakes constantly now. Everyone can see the bruises on his skin, but the patients are used to it. The nurses and doctors ignore it with the ease of long practice.

He isn't the first, after all.

* * *

_Dr. Allen Hunt is the best psychiatrist in the State. Mary Bennett is in tears as she reads the article, her hands shaking as she sips her coffee._

_Jamie needs her help. This obsession of his has gone too far. She is glad Sophie had outgrown her childish belief in fairy tales (or at least she's stopped going on about them and actually has a life), but her son…_

_Jamie had not. He grows more and more obsessed with the stories, the tales, and his drawings of the "Guardians" every day. He rarely leaves his room. He is flunking out of school – he has skipped most days than not. He is rude to his friends who have grown up and starts extremely vicious fights with those who make fun of his childish fantasies. He talked to the Moon, for God's sake! Constantly. Without end. His psychiatrists had made no process with him and Jamie's eerie silence had scared more than one of them away._

_He is even cold and hateful to Mary's fiancé, a truly handsome and charming man she had met a couple of years ago. Trevor gives Sophie and Jamie attention and love, but never once tries to replace their Father. Sophie has taken to Trevor like a duck to water but Jamie despises him. Every time Trevor would hug him or pat him on the head, Jamie would flinch away or stare at him with those dulled, dead eyes._

_And just today he had broken a young boy's arm simply for calling him a freak. Sophie had been so terrified, telling her at the hospital of the look of pure fury in Jamie's eyes. The mindless rage. Mary wanted her son to defend himself – especially against the nearly rampant bullying he had suffered through since starting Junior High – but this animalistic behavior scared her._

_Something had to be done, before Jamie did something he would regret. Maybe this Dr. Hunt could give her back the son she had known before that accursed "Jack Frost" entered their lives._

_She picks up the phone._

* * *

"Dr. Hunt wants to speak to you, Jamie."

He follows the orderly with graceful steps, raising each foot a very precise six inches above the linoleum before gently placing it down again.

The orderly is named Grace Worthington. She's cute. Her green eyes are as bright as her starched nurse's uniform, and her brown hair bounces around her faces in a short bob. She keeps giving him these very sly, very shy looks from the corner of her eye when she thinks he can't see it. He sees the lust in her eyes and ignores it. A lot of people get like this around him.

Grace watches the positively luscious patient walk woodenly into the head doctor's room with arousal stirring deep inside her.

He is the most beautiful thing she had ever seen – those big brown eyes framed by ridiculously long lashes, razor-sharp cheekbones, the longish mop of curling brown hair, the lithe and supple body, the wide, pouting mouth, and dear God, that _ass_.

She sighs and curses the fact that it's against the rules to have a relationship with a patient.

Though (and an extremely frightening smile spreads over Grace's smooth face, turning it into the countenance of the devil) it's not as if the boy could object if she snuck into his room one night after the medicine cart made its rounds. And hey, several other nurses had talked about it in giggles and whispers behind their hands of the times they themselves had snuck into the boy's room. He was practically a commodity for them to use in their stressful jobs, a thoroughly _wonderful_ benefit. It wasn't as if the higher ups cared, though Dr. Hunt didn't like it to happen _all_ the time.

The boy had nearly killed the first nurse who had snuck in, so now most of them snuck in after the cart went its rounds, they told her in whispers. Then the boy wouldn't exactly be in any condition to refuse. But Grace will be gentle with him, because she knows the others aren't.

Grace skips off to finish her duties, very much excited for the night ahead.

If she hears the near-silent sobs and grunts emanating from the room behind her, she pays them no mind.

Jamie Bennett has been at Shady Pines Institution for the Mentally Ill for two years. He is seventeen years old.

* * *

_Jamie feels tired all the time now. His dreams are full of nightmares that he can't banish no matter what he does. The Sandman's golden sand never reaches him these days._

_He wakes to the taste of black sludge choking his throat, screaming silently._

_No one realizes the Boogeyman haunts him constantly these days. No one cares. His mother turns the lights off when he's asleep and clucks disapprovingly at the multitude of nightlights he keeps everywhere in his room._

_"You're fourteen, Jamie! Not a child anymore," she tells him all the time, when she's not scolding him about the electricity bills._

_He begs the Guardians to help him, but they never come. He must be too old for them to care about anymore. Even though he helped them defeat Pitch and even though he was the last one to believe in them…they don't care about him. He knows they have jobs, _important_ ones, but he would have been ridiculously grateful for even one of them to stop in, just so he can know they're still there. That they still cared about him._

_But they don't and they're not coming to help him against the Boogeyman who delights in tormenting him every night while his days are filled with the brutal teasing of the kids who were once his friends and classmates who see him as a freak and a childish loser._

_The door opens and a new fear eats through him, trembling through his limbs and washing the color from his face. He smells the stink of alcohol from the bed where he's reading, and backs into the headboard to get away from the man standing at the doorway._

_He reaches out a hand and flicks the light off and Jamie buries his head in his pillow, shivering and shaking._

_He tries not to shudder when a clammy hand pushes him flat to the bed and slips under his shirt. He tries to ignore the evil words that pour from a slick-silver mouth brimming with lies even as those hands go lower and lower._

_He doesn't resist, just lays there like he's dead and tries not to think._

_"Good boy, good boy," the voice slurs in his ear. "Don't fight now, or I'll have to go say hello to little Sophie. You don't want that, now do you?"_

_The tears fill his eyes but he forces himself to hold still and feels an insane sort of hatred fill him from head to toe. He embraces the fire. It's better than the black cold that he's been struggling to banish ever since these nightly visits started happening._

_Jamie hears – over the grunts and unspeakable words pouring into his ears – the faint sound of a dark, awful laugh. He defeated the Boogeyman when he was a child, but Pitch Black's been having the last laugh for many years now._

_There are things worse in the world than a child's nightmares. And while the Boogeyman does not have the amount of influence over an adult that he has over a child, well…_

_The darkness that lives in all humans is something he knows very well. And _that_ darkness is something he _can_ influence._

* * *

Jamie hears things.

There are things that chitter and chirp in his ears in the dark of the night as he sits on his bed, staring and trembling at the shining white walls where shadows dance and laugh at him with gaping mouths full of sharp teeth.

The shadows follow him all the time now, laughing and sniggering when he jerks and twitches. He keeps his back to the walls as he walks, eyeing everyone and everything he passes with a deeply suspicious look on his face.

Nothing anyone does can illicit anything more than that from him. He stays so coldly stoic that even the nurses and doctor leave off bothering him. When someone stares at you with the eyes of a dead man, it's hard not to want to run screaming from the room. Those are the eyes of someone without hope, without love, so full of cold, cold hatred that doesn't even seem human.

But then it changes.

Sophie visits him one day, it's his birthday. He is eighteen years old when his sister sits down at the table with him, all smiling and perky at eleven, though her eyes are sad and as deep as the ocean and he feels something in him relax.

"Momma and _that man_ didn't want me to come," Sophie says softly, her thigh pressed into his as they eat the lunch especially prepared on the "Family Visit" days Shady Pines hosts. The vitriol and hate in Sophie's voice when she spoke about "_that man_" makes Jamie pause. Horror fills him.

Briefly he is himself again, all thoughts of nightmares and evil things lurking under the bed gone, and he grabs his sister by the shoulders.

"Did he hurt you, Sophie?" He rasps out, the horror of it banishing everything his mind.

He remembers the words that haunted his childhood ("…_I'll have to go say hello to little Sophie if you resist…"_) with chilling clarity and fiery hate nearly consumes his soul. If that bastard hurt Sophie he will hunt the man down and _massacre_ him-

Tiny arms curve around his waist and he flinches minutely because it's been years since he received a touch that doesn't hurt him. But Sophie says softly "He doesn't dare. I threatened to poison his food if he so much as tried. If he ever succeeded, I told him I would _castrate_ him."

The smile that spread across her face pleases Jamie _far_, far too much. He throws back his head and _roars_ with laughter laced with malice, Sophie giggling right along with him. It draws looks from all over the room, especially from his mother and that man, who stare at him in shock from where they are talking to Dr. Hunt.

Jamie has not laughed once since he was nine years old and bid goodbye to Jack Frost.

They don't stay very long. But Jamie has time to give Sophie his sketchbooks – all of them, even the ones he has hidden for years – and hugs her tightly, thanking her for letting him believe again. This day gives him strength for weeks to come.

And for the first night since he has entered these accursed walls, Jamie Bennett _dreams_.

* * *

_Jamie gets into his first fight when he is ten years old. To be fair, he does not start the fight. Several older kids begin viciously teasing Cupcake and a few of his other friends. Claude gets the crap kicked out of him when he tries to intervene. When Jamie intervenes, he gets punched in the face._

_Jamie Bennett knows he has a truly fearsome temper, he's known it for years, though he has a very long fuse._

_As the older kids mock him and his "loser" friends, Jamie Bennett loses his hold on his vicious temper for the first time in his life and _attacks_._

_It takes all five of his friends every ounce of strength they have to rip him off and away from the bleeding and wailing teenager who received the brunt of Jamie's fury._

_He's lucky this time – the police have had a lot of trouble with these kids before and Claude's near-fatal injuries are proof enough of what had triggered the incident. Beyond a stern warning all that happens is that Jamie is ordered to visit with a psychiatrist regularly._

_But his friends…well…_

_They look at him with a strange emotion in their eyes now._

_It looks a little like fear._

* * *

The nightmares return five months after Sophie's first (and only) visit.

Jamie – whose skin had regained its healthy sheen and eyes their vibrant color – tries to fight them off. He's very successful. So they go for the only weaknesses that Jamie still cares about.

Namely, his little sister and the Guardians.

When the Guardians aren't mocking him in cruel words, his sister has her back turned to him, hand-in-hand with that _bastard_, looking up at him in adoration with Mary Bennett on her other side, laughing joyously.

Then the images change.

The nightmares become dreams of death.

He screams in his sleep as he sees the Guardians perish a thousand and one times. The Easter Bunny is slowly, tortuously skinned, his still bloody carcass roasting over an open fire. The Sandman is devoured by a hundred thousand neighing nightmares. The Tooth Fairy is torn apart by gaping mouths filled with hundreds of shining, gleaming white teeth. Santa is buried under a mountain of carnivorous toys who leave but a picked clean skeleton in their wake, cackling up at him with carved mouths stained bright red with blood. Darkness slimes over the Moon, extinguishing its light, casting shadows over the Earth, leaving a wave of death and decay in its wake.

And _Jack…_dear God, seeing the white haired ice spirit die kills him inside more than anything else.

Usually it is through burning.

Men and women with shadowed faces tie a senseless Jack to a cross and set the wooden pyre below his feet aflame. Sometimes Jack screams, sometimes he does not. Sometimes his body melts like an icicle exposed to boiling water and sometimes…Jack burns like a human does.

Jamie has to watch because he can't close his eyes and when he can the image of Jack burning alive is imprinted on the inside of his eyelids. He has to watch as Jack's pale skin blackens and his eyeballs crisp and explode into a gory shower of white and red. He has to watch as the heat grows even fiercer and Jack's howls of agony grow shriller and oh holy God, his _flesh melts off his bones...!_

Jamie screams and screams and screams until his throat is ragged and bloody. Every night he is forced to watch this until, until…

The doctors are all relieved when that shrill, bloodcurdling wail from the solitary rooms finally, blessedly stops.

Only the patients know what it truly means. Their brown-eyed painter boy won't be drawing them any more pictures, smiling at them like the rise of the sun, or telling them stories about his adventures with the Guardians.

Little Katie – the only person in the entire place who could be accurately described as his friend because when he wasn't violent he was really nice and lonely and he liked people who didn't think he was crazy – looks up at the moon with big-big eyes.

"Why didn't you save him?" she accuses.

If the moon replies, she can't hear him.

* * *

_Jamie watches his most recent psychiatrist with wooden eyes. Her name is Francesca Hall, and he doesn't like her very much. She's very pretty, with waist-length black hair and sparkling blue eyes. She dresses rather unprofessionally for a psychiatrist – her button-up shirt is two sizes too tight and reveals a considerable amount of cleavage. Jamie has to restrain himself from asking what her rates are when she sits down and her tight black skirt rides up high. And those shoes could do considerable damage to somebody, he thinks in horrified fascination, looking at the three inch high stiletto black heels._

_(He should have stayed with Dr. Walters, he thinks in despair. At least the woman didn't dress like a whore) _

_He hopes she doesn't think he's so stupid that he didn't notice the looks she was giving _that man_, while his mother was still __**in the room**__. And the infuriating part is that _that man_ keeps giving her looks back. And his mother had thought her boyfriend was so "faithful"…Bah, it disgusts him._

_Sometimes Jamie thinks it's the rest of the world that needs the therapy, not him._

_She gives him a smile full of insincerity and hands him a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard and a pen. "Let's work on your anger and overactive imagination, Jamie. This is a good place to start," she says sweetly._

_For several seconds he just stares at it, unable to believe what he's seeing._

_"…How long have you been out of college?" he asks in bemusement, scanning the worksheet. It says – in bright bold letters "WHAT I AM WORRIED ABOUT" – and has rows and rows of things listed with convenient checkboxes right next to them._

_She looks at him curiously. "Um, a couple months? Why?"_

_He chooses not to answer that, fighting a smile. "And how long have you known…Trevor?" To say that man's name with as little loathing as he can muster is extraordinarily difficult, but his suspicions are immediately confirmed when the woman blushes._

_"W-well, he was a guest speaker at my college and he was just so fascinating that we kept up a correspondence! When he told me his son needed counseling-"_

_Jamie can't let that one pass. "Trevor Armand is not my father." His tone is still very pleasant, but something in it stops the woman cold. He rests his elbows on his knees, cups his chin in his hands and gives her a smile as fake as the one she gave him seconds before. "I don't know what he's been telling you, but he is not my father. And while my mom is more than a little willing to turn a blind eye to his discretions, I am not. I do not like you, Francesca Hall. You dress like a tart, flaunt your affair in front of my mother's face, and then presume to tell me that I have the problems."_

_She stares at him in shock as he sets the clipboard down on the table between them._

_"You're obviously an amateur psychiatrist, if that. I don't really know why I should tell you anything when it's patently obvious that there will be no such thing as patient confidentiality when it comes to you and that you will tell my mother and Trevor everything you learn about me in these sessions?"_

_He smiles as the woman trembles in the beginnings of rage._

_"So, Dr. Hall, why don't you do us all a favor and kindly give up? Because you, m'dear, don't have a chance in hell of matching wits with me."_

_The woman stands, slamming her clipboard down. "I see." Her voice was short and clipped as she marched out the door, spots of red high on her cheeks._

_Jamie sniggers. He is going to pay for that, but man oh man, the look on that arrogant bitch's face is so worth it. He leans back and looks at the sky outside the window, grinning helplessly at the snowflakes swirling in intricate patterns to the ground._

_"Man I wish you were here, Jack. You'd've found it funny too."_

* * *

It's obscenely cold here.

Jamie should probably go and put his jacket on, but he can't be bothered. The night sky is beyond beautiful and he feels so close to it, like he can reach out and grab a star.

Swinging his legs out over the immense expanse of emptiness, he tries and fails.

"Aw," he whines. He wonders what the juice of a star would taste like.

Jack would know. Jack knows everything.

But Jack isn't here.

* * *

_"He isn't real, Jamie."_

_He closes his eyes, clamps his hands over his ears as his mother towers over him, tears in her eyes._

_"This game has to stop! You're thirteen years old, too old to be believing in fairy tales!"_

_He feels tears leak out from his closed eyelids and muffles the urge to start screaming, just to block her out._

_"Why can't you just grow up!?"_

* * *

Jack promised once that he would take him on a trip to visit the moon. Jamie wonders what it would be like. Jack told him the moon was sentient.

He grins up at the moon and waves at it.

"Whass it like, up there?" he slurs, giving it a curious look. "D'you get lone'y? I get lone'y summat too. But Jack's promished to be 'ere and he always keeps 'is promishes…"

He giggles uncontrollably, but there's something desperate in that laugh.

"E'ryone tells me he's not rea'y there, but I know they're lyin'. Jack'd never lie to me. He wouldn't."

* * *

_His friends give him strange, pitying looks. He feels his temper flare but fights it back. These are his friends! They fought Pitch together. If anyone would stand by his side, it would be them!_

_"Aren't we a little old for fairy tales, Jamie?" Pippa asks him._

_His heart freezes. "What?"_

_"Yeah, man." This from Claude, who lightly punches him on the shoulder in the gesture of close friends. "We're not kids any more. Those sort of things – the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Jack Frost – Jamie, man, they don't exist."_

_He can't believe what he's hearing, but hearing it he is, as all of his old friends agree with the words Pippa and Claude are saying._

_"But we…but we all fought against Pitch! You guys remember that, right?"_

_The look they all exchanged was one he couldn't read. _

_"That was just a dream, Jamie," Cupcake says. "Remember that report about those natural gases that kept coming up over the lake? It said the levels of that gas were through the roof that year. We probably all just had hallucinations or something."_

_Jamie just stares at them all. Then he simply turns and walks away, unable to register this betrayal._

_They're just like everyone else._

* * *

Jamie laughs and sings wordless songs as tears drift down his cheeks.

He feels cold and tired and every part of him aches. He's always in pain these days. It never goes away, that deep ache that resonates in his very bones, throbbing each and every day.

It's been years since he's seen the sky.

He stands, balancing precariously in the cold gusts of air.

* * *

_Out of all the Guardians, he has to say that it's Jack he cares for the most. He's lived a life with little security – thanks to his estranged father and almost always working mother. It's not to say he's lived a life with little love, because despite her faults, Mary Bennett adores her children._

_But Jamie's lived in eighteen different states and countless cities and has never known true safety, true security – until he met Jack. It's with the ice spirit Jamie knows true security._

_Jack gives Jamie the protector he has always needed. When Jack's around, Jamie doesn't have to be the one who protects his friends, his sister. He doesn't have to be the one his mother confides in about her worries. He doesn't have to take on so many responsibilities with Jack._

_He can be a kid, something he lost when the three of them were forced to take up residence in a homeless shelter after being evicted from their crummy home._

_Jamie believes so deeply in the Guardians – and in Jack – because more than once has he reached a point where hope is the only thing he has to live for. He understands how powerful belief is because for a long time, belief was the only thing he had._

_If his belief goes, then an irrevocable part of Jamie goes with it and what would be left then? _

_If growing up means he has to give up what makes him Jamie Bennett, then growing up is the last thing he wants to do._

_It's so damn hard in a world that doesn't like childish things like hope and belief._

_But that's okay, because Jamie's lived on the street where people die every day and if you can't cling to your hope and belief with everything you have you either die or become such an irrevocable part of the street you can't ever get yourself free._

_He's willing to fight._

* * *

He flings out his arms, laughing and laughing.

"Jack!" he cries to the night around him. "Catch me, Jack!"

The wind rushes around him as he topples through the air, waiting, waiting for those blue-clad arms to tighten around his waist.

But he keeps falling.

And falling, falling, falling…

Thud.

* * *

_Jamie's favorite quote comes from a book about the end of the world. "There is an art, or rather a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss," he tells himself in his darkest moments. It never fails to make him laugh._

* * *

But Jamie Bennett doesn't have that knack.

Pity.


End file.
